]]>By: Louiehttp://mindhacks.com/2013/06/18/is-social-psychology-really-in-crisis/#comment-64487
Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:43:55 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=27041#comment-64487“And it would have no observable effect whatsoever, because all the myriads of possible “priming” stimuli would cancell each other out”

That would seem logical to me as well yes. I wonder if brilliant scientists ever tested such things. They must have, as it would seem such a logical thing to invstigate. Another thing I wonder is whether these kinds of experiments are only performed at universities in tightly controlled environments, using only a student population or whether they also test basic fingins on different (i.c. non-student) populations to investigate whether findings hold there. That would also seem very logical to investigate.

I would find it hard to believe that any of these “effects” hold in the real world in the general population, let alone when taking into account that it would seem logical that things would cancel eachother out if they would in fact have any real-world effect.

Maybe it you don’t believe in these findings, they don’t effect you? Have they invesigated that? Or maybe with all the controversy surrounding priming, one is negatively primed when reading about previous priming studies and one would conclude that it’s all just pretty sad stuff. Maybe priming does not work anymore in these university-labs because the students used as participants are now aware that they are participating in a priming study and may act differently?

Lots of questions to possibly be answered by performing even more priming-related research. With some luck, they would even get a nice publication in a fancy high-impact journal out of it: wooooooooooooooooooooooot !!

]]>By: Rolf Degenhttp://mindhacks.com/2013/06/18/is-social-psychology-really-in-crisis/#comment-64443
Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:47:39 +0000http://mindhacks.com/?p=27041#comment-64443I find the idea of priming unplausible, because it presumes that we are built by evolution in a way that makes us susceptible to random environmental influence beyond our control and not useful in an adaptive way. I it existed – if behaviors were triggered unconsciously by analogous stimuli in the outside world – we would be robots remote-controlled by random events. And here the thing is – we would practise some strange, ever changing dance, because there is a strong flux of events in the outside world that is allways producing stimuli with conflicting association power, some for example making us dumb, some making us clever. And it would have no observable effect whatsoever, because all the myriads of possible “priming” stimuli would cancell each other out. We actively react to these outside stimuli, we are not unconsciously controlled by them. This “theory” has absolutely no explanatory power and is a shame for our special field. And now there is even strong evidence that the whole idea of the cognitive unconscious is going down the drain: